The Student Leader Blog

And the Adventure Continues

It's been a month since my last post already?! That's crazy. Seems like just a month ago I was spittin' game about my really long hallway and incredibly clever decorating efforts.

Oh.

Well anyway, it's 10 minutes before my birthday, I'm turning 21, and I'm at college. Might as well post about how school has gone so far. Balancing classes and the RA job is a struggle but I get work done. Everyone knows how boring and awful classes are so I'll focus on the latter item there, the more fun part :).

My residents have been great lately. Sometimes they're a bit noisy, but I think given my residence hall's reputation for sort of wild and crazy kids I've done a decent job of keeping them on the straight and narrow, if I do say so myself. They do go out a lot, but that'll happen everywhere you pack 52 18-year-olds into a pretty small space. I haven't had to call the police or paramedics yet, so that's something.

Most of my residents go about their daily business without guidance from me but I do make an effort to talk to at least 3/4 of them twice a day, either about official school things or just to hang out. Those efforts paid off in a huge way last night. I have this annoying problem where I try not to mention my birthday in the weeks leading up to it, but I end up telling everyone I know a week ahead of time anyway. Well, one of my residents works at Hallmark. I was sitting in my room with the door closed yesterday. When I tried to leave, I couldn't, as my residents just wouldn't let me. Eventually they did and I found this:

No other RA that I've seen in my 2+ years here has had their door decorated by their residents on their birthday. It meant so much to me and I gave everyone involved a big hug. To amuse myself I will provide an image of some of those people here as well:

I caught a cold this week which has put a damper on the celebration but I don't care. It really showed they gave at least half a crap about me which meant all my work is paying off. Inside the little bag there I found lots of candy and birthday cards signed by the people who helped decorate and other random roommates. My parents and grandma are coming down tomorrow (actually today! I'm so wasted! Whoo!) so I can show them I've not been wasting my time here. Life is pretty cool sometimes.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive: a not-so-novel approach to recruitment

I've never been good at remembering expressions or using them appropriately (e.g. "don't put the cart before the horse," or "don't put all your eggs in one basket"). I'll inevitably screw them up somehow and very confidently say something like "don't put all your eggs before the horse."  Well, there's an expression that I should have tried out earlier than later that goes something like "ask and ye shall receive, seek and ya shall find."

It worked for the Bible (or at least so I hear) and it works for recruitment, as evidenced by the fact that this blog has gone from have 2 writers to 6 (soon to be 7) in a little over a week. What was my technique? I started seeking out promising students on Facebook (by looking for student government groups) and asking the leaders to write for the blog (until Facebook accused me of spamming), I sent a mass email to all student leaders at my own college, and I basically started telling everyone I could think of that I was recruiting for the blog. It was the mouse technique that I scoffed at in my last recruitment post, and apparently it works! All this time, I had been focusing on convincing a few people I knew to write and totally forgetting about the many amazing people that I had not met or thought of yet.

The other thing I've learned (or perhaps re-learned because I have a sneaking suspicion that I had already smacked myself on the forehead for this) is that you never know who will be right for your organization. For example, Steve DeSiena (sorry to point you out, Steve), is a perfect fit for this blog, but I honestly never thought to ask him directly because I figured that he was too busy and too funny to want to get involved. The forehead smack came when he responded to a mass email I sent, saying that he was interested AND knew someone else who'd be a good fit (Mike Sharp - who is a perfect addition).

The moral of this blog:
You never know who will hatch out of which egg, so put all the eggs into the basket, stick the basket in the cart, and get the horse to go asking because he'll eventually find what he's searching for. Got it?

P.S. Please welcome Nick Chapa, Steve DeSiena, Mike Sharp, and (soon to publish) Kody Tinnel!

How to Force Someone into Your Shoes (or Dealing with Pea Brains)

First thing this morning, I had a fascinatingly long argument with the head of my building's management, (let's call him Pea Brain), so I had plenty of time to practice all the communication techniques I've ever read, seen, or thought about.

I was doing my best to be a good listener. I was staying calm and not using "you" words. I was showing him that I understood his point of view. But Pea was persistent. He refused to see my side of it, no matter how sound my logic or nonthreatening my tone.

So I tried a little game on Pea that I tend to use on me. I said, "Okay, maybe you and I are just used to dealing with these kinds of situations in different ways. Let's say you are me. This is how you feel (followed by description with Pea as the main character instead of me). What would you do if this were you?"

At this point Pea finally stopped for a moment and scratched his head (or at least I'm reasonably sure that he might have but can't be certain seeing as it was a telephone conversation). He seemed to think about this (or at least I'm reasonable sure he may have thought but can't be certain since all he said was "uhhhh"). And then he finally tried on my proverbial shoes. At first he didn't quite get it, so I supplied him with some more information, and then, at last, he finally seemed to understand. He said,  "Fine whatever. Why are we wasting time talking about this?" (translation: ohhh I get it and feel kinda dumb). I tucked this technique into my arsenal and smiled.

So role playing isn't just for new-agey shrinks and drama majors after all.

April Fools Update

In 2 days, our little April Fools prank video (see previous post) has gotten over 1,000 views on YouTube and over 13,000 hits on our site (from a potential pool of 20,000 students).

The best part is that people are leaving comments on the video, which builds a greater sense of connectedness and general interest.

What seems to have worked about this project is that it was a bit controversial in the sense that we were making fun of people (albeit good naturedly and with their consent), it was funny, and it showcased a lot of Hunter places and faces.

This was pretty simple to pull off for April Fools. Let's see how we fare when the theme doesn't involve escaped hawks and embarrassed professors!

Pranking the college (Good ol' April Fools)

In honor of the first day of this wonderful month, we decided to get out to the halls of Hunter College and prank the poor unsuspecting students (see the video for the story). We also put up phony flyers and spread some rumors down various grapevines. The results so far: people are watching and talking! April fools (and I think pranks in general) are a great opportunity to get the college community bonding. I'll update you guys soon on how many views the video gets on our site and on YouTube.

Word of Mouth Marketing: free advertising and a heck of a pillow fight.

Word of mouth marketing is the least understood and most coveted promotional technique perhaps since the dawn of mankind. It's free, it's fast, it's powerful, but--alas--it is as mysterious to us as the nature of human consciousness and the evolution of the platypus.

According to the recent Word of Mouth Marketing Conference in NYC, the average person has about 11 intimate contacts, 150 social contacts, and 500 to 1,500 "weak ties." That's a lot of potential people your message could reach in less time than it takes you to say, "viral, viral, viral."

As student leaders, we should be trying to leverage the power of word of mouth, though I can't tell you how. The huge pillow fight last weekend (see above) was entirely word of mouth and apparently awesome. So for this post, I'm just going to use the pillow fight as a case study and thought experiment to try to figure out what it takes for a message to travel and stick.

Pillow Talk (hehe):
My thinking is that news of the fight spread like goose feathers on a windy day because:
a. It's weird. People are likely to look up and pay attention because it's not an everyday phenomenon.
b. It's a little mysterious. What will happen? Who will come? What kind of pillow should I bring?
c. It gives people something fun to do together.
d. It's inclusive (pretty much anyone can enjoy it and be a useful contributor).
e. And lastly, people are scared to go alone because they don't want to look stupid. So they enlist as many acquaintances as possible in case no one else shows up.

Again, this is not my field of expertise (or even experience), but I'm pretty darn sure that creating a viral messages requires a certain degree of risk taking and outside the box thinking. First and foremost, that's what gets people's attention and fills the streets with feathers. If anyone has other ideas, I'm very much up for hearing them (and, hey, maybe even spreading them out).